Lady in White

This portrait was never finished. In January 1918 Gustav Klimt had a stroke in his Vienna studio and died a few weeks later, at 55, leaving several canvases part-done on their easels, this one among them. You can still see where the paint thins out and the underdrawing shows through, the face carried further along than the loose colour around it. The woman is not a known client. Like several of Klimt's late heads she seems to be an imagined figure, and she does something his commissioned sitters almost never do, which is grin broadly out at the viewer. 1918 emptied Vienna of its modern art almost overnight. Within that single year the city also lost the architect Otto Wagner, the designer Koloman Moser and the young painter Egon Schiele, all dead in the same influenza-shadowed months.